[ Course Summary | Required Materials | Lectures | Assignments | Seminal Papers | Academic Integrity Policy | Related Web Sites | Prerequisites | Announcements ]

Due to some last minute changes I will be *not* be teaching session 048-30151D of the fall 2006 CSci585 course.

Course Summary, Fall 2006

This course covers the essential concepts, principles, techniques, and mechanisms for the design, analysis, use, and implementation of computerized database systems. Key information management concepts and techniques are examined: information modeling and representation; information interfaces - access, query, and manipulation, implementation structures, and issues of distribution. The database and information management system technology examined in this course represents the state-of-the-art, including traditional approaches as well as recent research developments. By providing a balanced view of "theory" and "practice," the course should allow the student to understand, use, and build practical database and information management systems. The course is intended to provide a basic understanding of the issues and problems involved in database systems, a knowledge of currently practical techniques for satisfying the needs of such a system, and an indication of the current research approaches that are likely to provide a basis for tomorrow's solutions.

General Information

Lecture times: M 06:30 - 09:20 pm.
Location: SLH 100.

People

Instructor: Prof. Roger Zimmermann

• Office: PHE 414
• Phone: (213) 740-7654
• Email: rzimmerm@imsc.usc.edu
• Office Hours: M 11:00 am to 12:00 pm, or by appointment
  

Teaching Assistant: TBA

• Office: SAL xxx
• Phone: (213) 740-xxxx
• Email: @usc.edu
• Office Hours: TBA

Teaching Assistant: TBA

• Office: SAL xxx
• Phone: (213) 740-xxxx
• Email: @usc.edu
• Office Hours: TBA

Teaching Assistant: TBA

• Office: SAL xxx
• Phone: (213) 740-xxxx
• Email: @usc.edu
• Office Hours: TBA

Grader 1: TBA

Grader 2: TBA

Announcements and FAQ (Fall 2006)

• 05-08-2006: The exam dates are fixed and everybody will take the exams on these days (posted on the class schedule below). There will be no make-up exams. There will be no exceptions!
• 05-08-2006: No cell phones will be allowed during exams.
• 05-08-2006: Local copies of some of the Additional Readings are provided. The files are password protected. I will give out the password in the first lecture.
• 05-08-2006: You have two weeks after you receive your graded exam or homework to contact the TAs with questions about the grading. After two weeks I assume that you have accepted your score.

Prerequisites

As stated in the university catalog, a passing grade in CSci485 or departmental permission is required to register for this class. Knowledge of relational databases and SQL is required.

The course involves challenging programming assignments and projects for which an understanding of and proficiency in programming with Java is required. Knowledge of JDBC is a plus.

Required Reading Materials (Fall 2006)
(Still subject to change, 05/08/2006.)

The official textbook for the class is "Fundamentals of Database Systems" by Ramez Elmarsi and Shamkant B. Navathe (4th Edition, Addison Wesley, ISBN 0-321-12226-7). The book is available at the USC Bookstore.

Additional Readings (A.R.). The papers below are required reading for all students in this class. The material covered in lectures should be considered the main definition of the scope of the course. However, the textbook and readings are important to supplement lecture material. Assignments and exams will be based on the topics presented in the lecture, and may also involve issues addressed in the textbook and readings.

Some of the documents below are password protected. The password for these files will be given out during the first lectures.

1. Jim Gray. "Evolution of Data Management." Computer v29 n10 (October 1996):38-46.
   A local copy of the paper is available here (password protected).
2. Jim Gray. "Database Systems: A Textbook Case of Research Paying Off." White paper, 1997.
3. "The Lowell Database Research Self-Assessment Meeting Report." Serge Abiteboul et al., May 4-6, 2003, Lowell, Mass.
4. B. Chandrasekaran, J. Josephson, and V. Benjamins. What are Ontologies, and Why Do We Need Them? IEEE Intelligent Systems, 14(1), 1999.
   A local copy of the paper is available here (password protected).
5. Andrew Eisenberg, Krishna Kulkarni, Jim Melton, Jan-Eike Michels, and Fred Zemke. "SQL:2003 Has Been Published." SIGMOD Record, 33(1): 119-126, March 2004.
   A local copy of the paper is available here (password protected).
6. Thomas Connolly, Carolyn Begg, and Anne Strachan. "Ch 17: Object Databases." Database Systems.
7. Michael Stonebraker. "Object-Relational DBMS-The Next Wave." Informix white paper.
8. Zhen Hua Liu. "Object-Relational Features in Informix Internet Foundation." Informix technical notes. 9.4 (Q4 1999):77-95.
9. Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0 (Third Edition); W3C Recommendation 04 February 2004 (http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml).
10. Ralf Hartmut Guting. "An Introduction to Spatial Database Systems." VLDB Journal 3(4): 357-399, 1994.
11. Hanan Samet. "Spatial Data Structures." In Modern Database Systems: The Object Model, Interoperability, and Beyond, W. Kim, ed., Addison Wesley/ACM Press, Reading, MA, 1995, pp. 361-385.
12. Antomn Guttman. "R-Trees: A Dynamic Index Structure for Spatial Searching." Proceedings of ACM SIGMOD, pp.47-57, 1984.
13. Timos Sellis, Nick Roussopoulos and Christos Faloutsos. "The R+-Tree: A Dynamic Index for Multi-Dimensional Objects." Proceedings of the 13th VLDB Conference, Brighton 1987.
14. Dimitris Papadias, Yannis Theodoridis, Timos K. Sellis and Max J. Egenhofer. "Topological Relations in the World of Minimum Bounding Rectangles: A Study with R-trees." Proceedings of SIGMOD, pp.92-103, 1995.
15. Peter Fankhouser and Philip Wadler. XQuery Tutorial, January 2002.
16. XQuery 1.0: An XML Query Language (http://www.w3.org/TR/xquery/ ).
17. Alin Deutsch et al. "Querying XML Data." Bulletin of Data Engineering, v22, n3, Sep. 1999.
18. Ali E. Dashti, Seon Ho Kim, Cyrus Shahabi, and Roger Zimmermann. "Streaming Media Server Design." Book chapters 1 & 2. Published by IMSC Press and Prentice Hall PTR, 1st Edition, March 2003, ISBN: 0-130-67038-3.
19. Cyrus Shahabi, Roger Zimmermann, Kun Fu, and Shu-Yuen Didi Yao. "Yima: A Second Generation of Continuous Media Servers." IEEE Computer Magazine, Vol.35, No.6, Pages 56-64, June 2002.
20. The STREAM Group, Stanford University. "STREAM: The Stanford Stream Data Manager" (short overview paper). IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin, Vol. 26 No. 1, March 2003. URL http://www-db.stanford.edu/stream.
21. Sailesh Krishnamurthy, Sirish Chandrasekaran, Owen Cooper, Amol Deshpande, Michael J. Franklin, Joseph M. Hellerstein, Wei Hong, Samuel R. Madden, Fred Reiss, Mehul Shah. "TelegraphCQ: An Architectural Status Report." To appear in: IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin.
22. The PostgreSQL PDF documentation file is here.
23. The PostgreSQL documentation web pages are here.

Lectures (Fall 2006)
(Lecture content subject to change, 05/08/2006.)

(A.R. refers to Additional Readings)

Exams and Assignments

There will be two exams in this course: a midterm and a second exam (not a final). Both exams will be given during scheduled class time. There will be three assignments. Remote login access is required for the assignments.

Grading scheme:

Assignment Descriptions

Grader: TBA

Use the Extended ER concepts to create a conceptual schema for a geotechnical information database example application. Submission of the result is in hardcopy form in class.

Homework #1 Solution

Grader: TBA

Create a Java client application with a GUI user interface that communicates with the course Postgres database server via a JDBC connection. The client application should have the following functionality:

1. Create a SQL schema (and therefore a database) in PostgreSQL of the EER diagram from HW#1 (you may use your own or the sample solution from HW#1).
2. Load your newly created database with the sample data given in class. The sample data is in XML format and you will need to convert the data to SQL.
3. Translate the given text queries to SQL and execute them on your database. Display the results of your queries in a text window of the client.
4. Delete your database.

Submission of HW#2 is in electronic form via totale.usc.edu. We will test it with our own data set.

Grader: TBA

Use the Qexo XQuery implementation to design and execute several queries in the XQuery language directly on the borehole data file in XML format.

Submission of HW#3 is in electronic form via totale.usc.edu. We will test it with our own data set.

Seminal Papers in Database Research

• Kapali P. Eswaran, Jim Gray, Raymond A. Lorie, Irving L. Traiger, The Notions of Consistency and Predicate Locks in a Database System. CACM 19(11): 624-633 (1976).
• C. Mohan, Donald J. Haderle, Bruce G. Lindsay, Hamid Pirahesh, Peter Schwarz, ARIES: A Transaction Recovery Method Supporting Fine-Granularity Locking and Partial Rollbacks Using Write-Ahead Logging. TODS 17(1): 94-162 (1992).
• Jim Gray, Paul R. McJones, Mike W. Blasgen, Bruce G. Lindsay, Raymond A. Lorie, Thomas G. Price, Gianfranco R. Putzolu, Irving L. Traiger, The Recovery Manager of the System R Database Manager. Computing Surveys 13(2): 223-243 (1981).
• Peter Pin-Shan Chen, The Entity-Relationship Model--Toward a Unified View of Data. ACM Transactions on Database Systems, Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 9-36, March 1976.
• Selinger, Patricia G., Morton M. Astrahan, Donald D. Chamberlain, Raymond A. Lorie, Thomas G. Price, Access Path Selection in a Relational Database Management System. Proceedings of ACM-SIGMOD, May 1979.

Academic Integrity

All homework and exams must be solved and written independently, or you will be penalized for plagiarism. The USC Student Conduct Code prohibits plagiarism. All USC students are responsible for reading and following the Student Conduct Code, which appears on pp. 76-77 of the 2006-2007 SCampus.

In this course we encourage students to study together. This includes discussing general strategies to be used on individual assignments. However, all work submitted for the class is to be done individually.

Some examples of what is not allowed by the conduct code: copying all or part of someone else's work (by hand or by looking at others' files, either secretly or if shown), and submitting it as your own; giving another student in the class a copy of your assignment solution; consulting with another student during an exam. If you have questions about what is allowed, please discuss it with the instructor.

Students who violate University standards of academic integrity are subject to disciplinary sanctions, including failure in the course and suspension from the University. Since dishonesty in any form harms the individual, other students, and the University, policies on academic integrity will be strictly enforced. We expect you to familiarize yourself with the Academic Integrity guidelines found in the current SCampus.

Violations of the Student Conduct Code will be filed with the Office of Student Conduct, and appropriate sanctions will be given.

For the 2006-2007 academic year there is new Student Judicial Affairs and Community Standards web site. Its resources include two student-oriented publications in both viewable and printable forms:

1. "Trojan Integrity Guide (A Guide to Avoiding Plagiarism)" addresses issues of paraphrasing, quotations and citations in written assignments, drawing heavily upon materials used in the university's Writing Program;
2. "How to get an F on an A paper: A Trojan Integrity Overview (A Guide to Understanding and Avoiding Academic Dishonesty)" addresses more general issues of academic integrity, including guidelines for adhering to standards concerning examinations and unauthorized collaboration.

Related Web Sites

• PostgreSQL
• USC Data Management Research Laboratory
• USC Integrated Media Systems Center
• Stanford University Database Group
• University of Wisconsin Database Group
• University of Maryland Database Group
• Excellent tutorial on XML, XSL,..
• The Spatial Index Structures demo webpage
• W3C XML
• XQuery Demonstration Site
• XQuery Tutorial by Fankhouser and Wadler
• XQuery 1.0: An XML Query Language
• XQuery Tutorial by Moller and Schwartzbach
• Qexo - The GNU Kawa implementation of XQuery

In the fall of 2002 I was teaching a CSci599 course called "Integrated Media Systems (IMS)" together with Alexandre Francois (TTh 11-12:20 in THH 140). This was the first course specifically dedicated to media systems integration. This graduate level seminar course introduced students to the specific technological and organizational difficulties of designing and building media rich integrated systems.

The class web site is here. See also the CS department class schedule.

Central to the design and implementation of the course was the Software Architecture for Immersipresence (SAI), IMSC's framework for the design, implementation and integration of distributed interactive, immersive, collaborative systems.

Multimedia processing and application integration techniques were illustrated in a distributed class project. Using the Modular Flow Scheduling Middleware (MFSM - http://mfsm.sourceForge.net), an open source implementation of SAI, the 25 students developed a playable on-line (simplified) soccer game in just a couple of months. Small teams developed independent modules implementing key functionalities in different areas of media processing: networking (client/server), database (game recording and replay), rendering, physics/gameplay, interaction devices (including gamepad-based control and cyberglove-based gesture recognition control). These modules were then used to build the different applications forming the game (game and database servers, player and spectator clients). The game was demonstrated at IMSC's last BOC/SAB meeting (providing well deserved entertainment to adventurous board members).

This course represents a major advancement in the teaching of "multimedia," by addressing specifically integration issues, with hands-on experience. It spectacularly demonstrates the efficiency of SAI as a framework for distributed development of integrated systems. It also validates MFSM not only as an invaluable development tool for building such systems, but also as a teaching tool that the students will be able to take from the classroom to the research or development environment.

Maintained by Roger Zimmermann
Last updated: September 13, 2006.
All Rights Reserved © USC Data Management Research Laboratory 1999 - 2006.